More trump harm for our national defense
I am now getting a substack feed called Noapinion, from Noah Smith.
This starts out with a WWII lesson from the British navy. They won a battle in 1940 against the Italian fleet using Aircraft and then put 2 major warships into the same danger as the Italians in the South China sea where they were sunk. Warfare has changed again with drones. It is estimated that 70% of damage and fatalities are now caused by cheap drones. The US has lost 7 multimillion dollar drones in Yemen.
His point late in the essay is that Trump's policies and the Chinese response to tariffs is killing our ability to ramp up production of these new fighting machines. Trump is gutting Biden's research programs and China has limited magnet shipments.
Both are critical.
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How Chinese drones could defeat America
A Ukrainian drone attack shows our extreme vulnerability.
Noah Smith
Jun 3
READ IN APP
Let me tell you a story about World War 2. In 1940, before the entry of the U.S. and the USSR into the war, Britain was fighting alone against Germany and Italy. Despite being massively outnumbered and outgunned, the British managed to pull off a spectacular naval victory, using innovative new technology. They sent the HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, to attack the Italian fleet in its harbor at Taranto. The British aircraft disabled three Italian battleships and several other ships, without the Italian navy even seeing their opponents’ ships, much less having a chance to fight back.
But that’s just the prelude to my story, which is not about a British victory, but a British defeat. Just a little over a year after the Battle of Taranto, Winston Churchill sent the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse to deter Japan from attacking Singapore. Despite their own crushing victory at Taranto, the British military leadership was skeptical that battleships moving under their own power at sea could be taken down by air attack alone. They placed their faith in the power of zigzag movement and anti-aircraft guns to deter attacking planes.
This was foolish. Japanese torpedo bombers found and sank the Prince of Wales and the Repulse quite easily. Here is an aerial photo of the British warships, taken from the cockpit of a Japanese plane, desperately trying to evade their doom:
The great battleships — the invincible masters of the sea in previous wars — were suddenly helpless against the swarm of tiny aircraft. Churchill reacted with shock and horror, and the British fleet withdrew, essentially leaving Southeast Asia to the Japanese.
The world had changed, almost overnight. Air power had brought about a revolution in military affairs. Ironclad battleships went from the single most valuable piece of military hardware to being almost obsolete overnight. Yet people who had invested their countries’ treasure in battleship fleets, like Churchill, were painfully slow to realize the shift — even when it was their own technological innovations that rendered their old weapons useless.¹
OK, so there’s your old WW2 parable, with a clear moral to the story: Don’t ignore technological revolutions. Now fast-forward to 2025. We may just have witnessed something akin to a modern Battle of Taranto. For years, Russia has used its strategic bombers — which can also carry nuclear weapons — to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine from a huge distance. The Ukrainians had attacked these bombers on the ground with drones, but the Russians simply moved them farther away, well out of reach of anything the Ukrainians could launch from their own territory.
So the Ukrainians got sneaky. They packed a bunch of drones — little plastic battery-powered quadcopters, not too different from a toy you would fly at the park — into trucks and (somehow) sent the trucks all the way across Russia. When the trucks got close to the air force bases where the Russians had parked their bombers, the Ukrainian drones popped out of the trucks and started blowing up the bombers — and other planes — on the ground. You can see the footage of the attack here:
And you can see some pictures of the drones used in the attack here:
It’s not clear how many Russian bombers the Ukrainians managed to take out, but everyone agrees it was a significant chunk of Russia’s bomber force. And these magnificent, enormously expensive, rare, highly prized machines of destruction were taken out battery-powered toys.
Again, the world has changed, almost overnight.
The American military is much better than the Russian military, but it’s ultimately not that different — it’s built around a bunch of big, expensive, heavy “platforms” like aircraft carriers, jet planes, and tanks. Each F-22 stealth fighter, still widely considered the best plane in the sky, cost about $350 million to build. A Ford-class aircraft carrier costs about $13 billion each. An M1A1 Abrams tank costs more than $4 million, and so on.
That’s the amount of value that will be destroyed every time a cheap plastic battery-powered Chinese drone takes out an expensive piece of American hardware in a war over Taiwan, or the South China Sea, or Xi Jinping waking up in a bad mood — not including, of course, the lives of whatever Americans happen to be inside the hardware when it gets destroyed. Except the true value lost will be much higher, since — like Japan in World War 2, or Russia now — the U.S. now has extremely limited defense manufacturing capacity, and thus won’t be able to easily replace what it loses.
As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.
That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the U.S. defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield.
The other question we need to be asking is: Why can’t the U.S. just do the same thing to China, in the event of a war? We have drones, right? Weren’t we the inventors of drone technology? Don’t we have innovative startups like Anduril, and Skydio, and lots of others racing to arm our military with the world’s best drones?
Well, OK. The U.S. did invent drone technology. But most of what we currently use are lumbering, expensive systems like the MQ-9 Reaper:
Each one of these giant drone planes costs $33 million. During the recent U.S. conflict with the Houthis — a conflict in which the U.S. was essentially defeated — the ragtag Yemeni militia shot down at least 7 of these Reaper drones, and possibly as many as 20. America in total has only a few hundred.
The kind of drones used in the Ukrainian raid, on the other hand, are “FPV” drones — that stands for “first person view”. These are small battery-powered plastic copters equipped with explosives. There are many types, but here’s one example:
Photo by Arminform via Wikimedia Commons
These drones cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, depending on the type. Ukraine is currently producing thousands of these drones per day, and says it expects to be able to produce over 10,000, although either the base drone (before weapons and other military hardware are added) or the parts used to make the drone typically come from China.
Why so many? FPV drones aren’t just useful for the kind of long-range surprise attack that Ukraine just carried out. In fact, they’re steadily replacing every other type of weapon on the battlefield. FPV drones can take out tanks, including America’s best tanks. They are now estimated to cause 70% of the casualties on the battlefield — more than artillery, the traditional “god of war”. Here are some excerpts from a Bloomberg explainer:
Tens of thousands of the relatively cheap and expendable machines are now buzzing back and forth over the front lines, pinpointing Russian positions, gathering intelligence to anticipate impending assaults, colliding with enemy targets or dropping bombs on them.
By early 2025, drones were accounting for 60% to 70% of the damage and destruction caused to Russian equipment in the war, according to UK-based think tank the Royal United Services Institute…
Military commanders around the world are taking note. Taiwan is investing in mass-produced drones in anticipation of a possible conflict with China. Israel has recalibrated the Iron Dome air defense system in the war in Gaza to account for maneuverable drones — one of its biggest blind spots. European governments embarking on their largest rearmament since the Cold War have identified drones and counter-drone systems as an investment priority. The US Pentagon, which pioneered sophisticated and expensive drones sourced from big arms contractors, is looking to buy cheaper ones designed by startups and deployed en masse…
Small, light drones with multiple rotors have become the defining innovation of the war. Known as first-person view drones, they are typically controlled in real time via a video feed by an operator who can “see” through an onboard camera using electronic goggles so they can fly beyond the line of sight. Social media is full of videos showing the machines closing in on troops, armored personnel carriers, missile batteries and command posts until the moment of impact, when the picture turns to static…Other rotor drones are used to drop grenade-sized explosives on targets and can be reused if they make it back safely.
Bloomberg says that the parts used to make Ukraine’s drone fleet are bought “online”, but that is a euphemism. They are made in China.
An FPV drone is basically:
some injection-molded plastic parts
some trailing edge computer chips (microcontrollers, sensors, etc.)
an electric motor made of rare earth permanent magnets
a lithium-ion battery
The U.S. can still make plenty of trailing-edge computer chips, but the rest of these items are all China, China, China.
China does most of the injection molding in the world — about 82%, according to one 2024 estimate. Currently, I know of no government plan to restore America’s lost capacity in injection molding. In fact, Trump’s tariffs — if they ever go into effect — are expected to severely damage the U.S. injection molding industry, by cutting American injection molding companies off from imports of the specialized equipment they need.
China also makes most of the electric motors in the world. This is because China makes most of the magnets, and an electric motor is basically just made out of magnets. The rest of the world is scrambling to add magnet production capacity, but for the rest of this decade, China will dominate:
Snip.
China makes most of the batteries in the world. In 2022 it had 77% of global manufacturing capacity. Here’s a projection out to 2030:
Now, though, Donald Trump and the Republicans are canceling the policies that were promoting American battery manufacturing:
A tax and policy bill passed by House Republicans…would gut subsidies for battery manufacturing, incentives for purchases of electric vehicles by individuals and businesses, and money for charging stations that Congress passed during the Biden administration. And it would impose a new annual fee on owners of electric cars and trucks.
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